euromaxx series: Christmas Specialties - Part 6

The following recipe will make two stollen.

Ingredients:

1000 g flour
100 g yeast (2,5 cubes)
1/2 liter milk
200 g sugar
500 g butter
500 g raisins
150 g currants
200 g candied orange or lemon peel
250 g sweet and bitter almonds
10 g salt
Spice Mixture (one tsp each: cardamon, vanilla, mace)
1-2 tsp vanilla extract
Rum to soak the dried fruits

Approximately 150 g butter to brush over the baked stollen and icing sugar to dust baked stollen

Preparation:

Day Before:

Pour rum over raisins, currants, orange/lemon peel and chopped almonds. Cover and let stand over night.

Preparing the starter:

Sift flour into a bowl and make a well in the center. Crumble and add the yeast, along with a little warm milk (four tablespoons) and a teaspoon of sugar. Stir until it forms a liquid paste. Let starter rise for 45 minutes in a warm place.

Preparing the dough:

Heat butter until melted. Heat milk until it is lukewarm and mix starter with the butter, milk, sugar, salt and spice mixture. Knead dough vigorously until it separates from the mixing bowl in a ball. Cover and let rise for 30 minutes in a warm place.

Now add the fruits soaked in rum and knead dough again. Let rise for another 30 minutes and then knead again.

Dust a cutting board or kitchen countertop with flour. Divide dough in half and roll each half into an oblong oval. Slit each stollen length-wise down the middle, about one centimeter into the dough.

Place the stollen next to each other on a baking sheet lined with baking parchment and let rise another 30 minutes in a warm place. Preheat oven to 175° Celsius (convection oven) or 200° Celsius(standard oven). Bake on middle shelf for twenty minutes. Then reduce temperature to 150° / 175° and bake for further 35-40 minutes. (Test: Stick a knitting needle or crochet hook into the stollen. It is ready when no dough apart from minute crumbs sticks to the needle.)

Mix together icing sugar and vanilla.

Brush the stollen with melted butter immediately after taking them out of oven and then dust with with the icing sugar-vanilla mixture. Let stollen cool.

Stollen will taste its very best if you let it mature for at least two weeks after it's cooled. (To do so, first wrap it in aluminium foil and then seal in an airtight plastic bag.)

Baking a stollen is not as easy as baking cookies. Difficulty level: medium. Preparation lasts about three hours plus the time the fruits need to soak in rum. As far as calories are concerned, stollen is somewhere in the middle of the vast array of Christmas goodies. 100g Christmas stollen has about 400 calories (less than many cookies).